[NOTE: TEXT IN ITALICS IS NARRATION FROM GOVERNMENT FILMS]

CLIPS FROM GOVERNMENT FILMS: An entire island was vaporized, and sections of islands on either side were chopped off.

The battalion employed standard unit decontamination procedures.

Both missile and warhead burned on the launching pad.

Coreo-retinal burns were produced on all rabbits exposed.

This is the peaceful potential of nuclear explosives that the United States is developing for all mankind.

The tremendous yield resulted in a serious fallout situation.

Less than a mile from ground zero, a human being in a shelter should have survived.

Simple, yet effectively responsive, nuclear firepower.

TITLE SLATE: “America’s Defense Monitor. Television for Changing Times.”

NARRATOR: From 1945 to 1992, the United States exploded 1032 nuclear weapons, including the only two ever used in war. The Energy Department recently declassified dozens of secret films depicting the testing and development of these weapons. Produced throughout the Cold War, these films provide a window into the often-conflicted mind-set of those who lived and worked with the Bomb – as well as all of us who lived in its shadow.

FILM CLIP: From studies of ruins and damage such as this, we get the hard-to-come-by knowledge that helps us form rules for survival in modern warfare.

MILLER: These films deliver a mixed message.

NARRATOR: Mark Crispin Miller is a noted media critic at New York University, and author of Mad Scientists, a forthcoming book on propaganda.

MILLER: On the one hand, you can’t help but be very struck by the ruinousness of these weapons. On the other hand, there’s the confident voiceover, and the shots of capable, self-possessed citizens, duly going into the shelter.

FILM CLIP: In most cases, evasive action from the brief flash of heat cannot be accomplished. However, anything that casts a shadow will afford some protection from this flash of heat. Ordinary clothing, as light-colored and loose-fitting as possible, offers excellent protection at distances greater than one mile.

HARRIS: ‘Many of the worst effects of radiation can be avoided by wearing clothes.’

NARRATOR: Bob Harris is a political humorist who hosts a daily radio show in Los Angeles. He writes a weekly column for MoJo Wire online and recently wrote Steal This Book – and Get Life Without Parole.

HARRIS: ‘So if you're planning on surviving a nuclear war, be sure to wear clothes.’ That's very handy, because I normally wear very little more than an ankle bracelet and a couple of henna tattoos.

NARRATOR: Most of the films were intended for internal government use only. Others were civil defense films aimed at reassuring an increasingly uneasy nation.

MILLER: The subtext of these films is, nuclear war is survivable, and hence winnable.

FILM CLIP: “Let’s Face It”: Let’s face it; the threat of hydrogen bomb warfare is the greatest danger our nation has ever known.

HARRIS: I love the headline here. They couldn’t get a newspaper that holds still, of course: ‘Russians explode H-Bomb. Oh, and by the way, the CIA just overthrew the Iranian government.’

FILM CLIP: These are the signs of the times. Only a practice now, a rehearsal, a training exercise. But tomorrow, this siren may be the real thing. And if you hear it, as you drive in your auto, as you sit in your office, or work at your bench--

Wherever you are, what will you do? What will happen to you? Let’s face it; your life, the fate of your community and the fate of your nation, depends on what you do when enemy bombers head for our cities.

MILLER: These films are not only trying to calm people and allay their fears, but they’re also implicitly authoritarian. They basically urge mass obedience: don’t rebel, don’t criticize, don’t raise any questions, simply do as you’re told.

FILM CLIP: And that is why civil defense was organized, to teach you how to survive in the thermal nuclear age, by taking shelter, or by evacuating your area, as directed.

MILLER: You know, the arms race was predicated on precisely this attitude, mass acquiescence. If people had been more activist and assertive, better informed, things might have gone in another direction.

FILM CLIP: After a final briefing from the officer in charge, just before H-hour, the men disappear into their foxholes. Every precaution has been taken for their safety.

They are told to crouch low, shield their eyes, and remain down until the signal to rise is given. Now, the moment of greatest anxiety; waiting those last few seconds. Seconds later, the blast wave reaches the trenches.

As the tower of smoke and flame looms overhead, one thought is uppermost in all minds; now it’s over. The fury of it had stung some, but not one was injured.

HARRIS: They just took a face full of radioactive fallout emanating directly form the epicenter, but they're gonna be just fine. The buildings have been blown completely from their frames, and yet somehow we're supposed to be reassured by this footage. The level of doublethink that's required here to accept any of what we're being told is just outstanding.

FILM CLIP: “Let’s Face It”: In the thermonuclear age, civil defense, like military defense, must be flexible. It must develop and grow, even as the forces that threaten our existence. And so until men of goodwill have turned this awesome power to peaceful uses, let us recognize the threat to our way of life. The threat to our survival. And, let’s face it.

MILLER: The worship of technology is evident, I think, in a lot of the shots in these films that represent the fireworks in the sky as heavenly entertainment, the face of God.

FILM CLIP: 3, 2, 1, fire.

NARRATOR: Less than a year after World War II, the United States conducted Operation Crossroads, exploding two nuclear weapons on the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. The second blast showered radioactive spray across a large area, causing widespread contamination.

WEISGALL: They had a disaster on their hands.

NARRATOR: Jonathan Weisgall is a lawyer for the Bikini islanders and has written a book on Operation Crossroads.

WEISGALL: Lingering radiation remains in the soil at Bikini Atoll. And because plants concentrate those radioactive materials, it is not possible for the people of Bikini to live there today if they want to eat local food.

NARRATOR: The 1946 film depicts the local leader willingly giving up his kingdom to the U.S. Navy.

FILM CLIP: King Judah, ruler of Bikini. It was he, King Judah, who unselfishly gave his island to the United States in order that these experiments could be conducted.

WEISGALL: Well, he gave up his island kingdom, and there was certainly a selfless quality to it, but it was under duress; there’s just no question about it. When the Bikinians were evacuated, there were something like fifteen Navy ships in the lagoon. Navy personnel were already detonating, oh, pinnacles that were sticking up in the reef. They were preparing for the tests. To stand up there and say no was certainly out of the question.

FILM CLIP: Crossroads, scene 25, take 1.
Now then, James, will you tell them that the United States government now wants to turn this great destructive force into something good for mankind.

WEISGALL: There was staged propaganda, there’s really no other way to describe it. A Navy commodore stands up and through an interpreter, asks “would your people be willing to leave?” And King Judah pops up and says “no problem,” or, you know, “that’s fine, everything is in God’s hands.” And they taped this forty, fifty times over, because the commodore kept screwing up his syntax, and it didn’t work right, and he’s say oh, “cut!”

FILM CLIP: Something good for mankind.(Cut)
Something good for mankind.

An entire island was vaporized, and sections of islands on either side were chopped off.

NARRATOR: In 1954, the United States conducted a series of thermonuclear explosions, code-named Castle, in the Pacific islands. The first test, dubbed Bravo, produced an explosion of fifteen Megatons, the largest nuclear blast ever conducted by the U.S.

FILM CLIP: This is a thermonuclear weapon, detonated on Bikini Atoll, as it was witnessed on Enewetok Atoll, two hundred miles away.

NARRATOR: Due to a scientific misunderstanding, the explosion was almost three times larger than expected. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed more than 100,000 people. Bravo was roughly 600 Hiroshimas bigger than predicted.

FILM CLIP: The tremendous yield resulted in a serious fallout situation at Bikini, and certain other atolls downwind from ground zero.

WEISGALL: Bravo was, I think, probably the greatest disaster in, certainly in the U.S. nuclear testing program.

NARRATOR: Fallout from the Bravo explosion contaminated 7000 square miles, including some inhabited islands and a Japanese fishing boat, The Lucky Dragon. All 23 crewmen were afflicted with radiation sickness and one soon died. The military sought to downplay the seriousness of Bravo’s effects.

FILM CLIP: This was the forecast wind direction. The actual wind was in this direction, some ten degrees less favorable than forecast. Even so, the winds were within the area of acceptable fallout.

WEISGALL: From the get-go, the US reports were false. A, we knew the wind was blowing the wrong way. B, we, the United States, took action to protect sailors on ships. Point C, it took several days to evacuate the Marshall Islanders on Rongalap and Utrick Atolls. So at that point, we had a pretty nice laboratory of exposed people.

FILM CLIP: The high yield, plus a wind factor, caused contamination of distant populated atolls, providing a completely new source of study on these effects.

All of those exposed were taken to Kwajelein, where complete physical examinations were carried out. Every effort was made to assure their comfort and well-being.

None of the doses appeared to reach levels of immediate combat significance, nor did the people suffer severe effects.

WEISGALL: When the people got to Kwajelein Atoll, the U.S. military base a couple of hundred miles away, they were showing all the symptoms of acute radiation sickness. Nausea, vomiting, lowering of white blood cell counts, and loss of hair.

MILLER: You have to listen very carefully to the language they use to describe what’s going on. On the one hand, there’s a show, as usual, of openness, of candor. We’re showing you the results of an error, right? But there’s a much more powerful and I think successful effort at the same time, to minimize not only the destructiveness and the suffering, but also, to erase the moral dimension of the whole episode. ‘There’s really nothing to worry about here. In fact, it was a good thing, because we learned from it. And anyway, we took care of them, and they weren’t suffering.’ It was one excuse after another.

FILM CLIP: Fallout from the larger Castle shots blanketed areas of more than 5,000 square miles with radioactive material that would have been lethal to unprotected personnel. This one result gives a new insight into a method for using high yield weapons in both strategic and tactical situations.

HARRIS: When there are unexpected effects in explosions, they refer these as being of further use, of potential benefit. In other words, "Gosh, it kills people this way too? Cool!"

NARRATOR: One way to make something as terrifying as nuclear weapons less threatening is to make it commonplace. Project Plowshares was a program that sought to explore ways to use nuclear weapons for a variety of everyday engineering jobs.

FILM CLIP: Excavations of new harbors, big dams, canals, passes through rugged mountainous terrain. These and other massive imaginative, earth-moving projects may soon be ours. Created in seconds, with the tremendous energy of the peaceful atom.

HARRIS: That’s right, excavating with nuclear explosives. That's like plumbing with nuclear explosives. Dentistry with nuclear explosives. ‘It's just a pinch. You won't feel hardly anything.’ The Plowshare Program. Which is an obscenity. They're quoting the Bible here in order to rationalize weapons of mass destruction.

FILM CLIP: To bring freedom of movement where there are imposing barriers. And commerce, where nature has decreed there will be isolation. To perform a multitude of peaceful tasks, for the betterment of mankind, man is exploring a source of enormous, potentially useful energy: the nuclear explosion.

HARRIS: They're talking about taming the world, taming the environment with the use of nuclear weapons. This is very, very much in the great American tradition of manifest destiny, of bending the environment to the world of man, being separate from the planet and the ruler of his domain, and so therefore we will make Mother Nature do what we want her to do, even if we have to use nuclear weapons to do it.

FILM CLIP The peaceful atom. A tool to move a mountain.

MILLER: Now, we had weapons at our disposal that had the potential to destroy the whole planet. This turn of events threatened to arouse a lot of people against war, period, and certainly against the Cold War, against the arms race. So, what better way to try to assuage those anxieties, than to assure people that this technology could also do good. So that you are basically a barbarian, you’re against civilization, you’re a Luddite, if you balk at the development of this new technology.

NARRATOR: Another innovative application for the Bomb was the “Special Atomic Demolition Munition,” an anti-ship explosive.

FILM CLIP: He actuates the single-point quick release mechanism, and the SADM drops to the end of the lowering line.

HARRIS: Cowabunga, dudes. This is like Lloyd Bridges on bad acid. This is like "Seahunt" from hell. Jumping out of an airplane so he can go scuba diving with a nuclear warhead on his back. Talk about your Extreme sports.

FILM CLIP: The time delay between arming and detonation, pre-set during preparation of the munitions, allows the swimmers time to make a safe escape.

NARRATOR: The United States exploded nuclear weapons on land, at sea, in the air, and underground. But few people are aware that we also exploded nuclear weapons in space.

FILM CLIP: Today’s increasing international emphasis on long range ballistic missile activity raises to priority attention, the mastering of high-altitude burst effects phenomenology.

NARRATOR: One of these explosions knocked out electrical power in Hawaii, 800 miles away, triggering hundreds of burglar alarms and circuit breakers.

FILM CLIP: The effects of high-altitude detonations on communications were found to be most complex in nature, and more information is needed before the phenomena are fully understood.

NARRATOR: As part of another high-altitude test, rabbits were taken up in an airplane to see if the flash from the explosion would burn their retinas.

FILM CLIP: Each station had instrumentation to record the thermal input, and cameras to record the visibility and the attitude of the rabbits’ eyes at time of burst.

On Teak, coreo-retinal burns were produced on all rabbits exposed, except on the surface ship at three hundred miles, where clouds and the ship roll may have prevented the rabbits from viewing the initial flash.

HARRIS: This is the scariest looking doctor I have ever seen. This bunny has been blinded by an atomic blast, and he's getting right up in there, and looking right at it, and how does he kiss his mother? If I saw this man on the street, I’d run in terror. He's clearly got no soul. Now of course this wasn't for domestic consumption. This was something that would probably cause outrage, you'd hope. Although in some parts of the country people'd look at that and go "Ummm, good eatin'!"

NARRATOR: The program to test nuclear weapons in space was plagued by malfunctions. The missile carrying one warhead went off track and exploded directly over the test site, sending personnel scrambling for cover. Another missile caught fire on the launchpad and exploded, scattering radioactive debris across the complex.

FILM CLIP: Damage to the pad was extensive, as could be plainly seen next morning. Less visible, but more dangerous, was the long life radioactive contamination of the pad area from the warhead. It was obvious that this would cause a significant delay of the operation.

NARRATOR: Efforts to clean up the site’s plutonium-laced soil continue to this day.

The U.S. even planned a nuclear explosion on the moon as a demonstration to the Russians, but the plan was never carried out.

FILM CLIP: “WARM COAT”: It’s good to relax after a busy day. An average day, but a busy day. These fellows wearing the warm coats, spend a good part of each day just searching for food. And in this sea, at this point in time, it’s becoming difficult to find enough food to go around. But things are looking up, as you will see.

NARRATOR: This film, depicting an otter relocation program, would hardly seem to be about nuclear weapons. But in fact, it sets the stage for the largest underground nuclear test ever conducted by the United States -- exploded in 1971 on Amchitka island in Alaska.

FILM CLIP: “WARM COAT”: At last count, perhaps 3,000 otters, including Harvey here. Table manners? He’s irrepressible.

NARRATOR: At five Megatons -- more than 300 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb -- the Cannikin explosion caused such environmental havoc that it is reportedly still leaking radioactivity into the ocean today. A separate film suggests the force of that explosion.

FILM CLIP: CANNIKIN EXPLOSION: While water turbulence was created in the immediate vicinity of Amchitka, no tsunami or large ocean wave was observed or recorded.

NARRATOR: The Cannikin test killed an estimated 800 otters, the force of the blast driving their eyeballs back into their heads and crushing their skulls. Harlequin ducks were found with their backs broken and their legs driven up into their bodies.

FILM CLIP: “WARM COAT”: Right now they are happy in new homes. They have been rudely moved, but they will adjust. They will keep their coats clean and warm. They will play, and amuse each other, even as you and I. Right, Harvey?

HARRIS: I think the only thing that’s truly honest in that whole piece of film is the words “The End.”

MILLER: In a way, the most chilling film in the whole archive is the one about Harvey the Otter. I don’t think his parents named him that. I say it’s the most chilling, because in a way, it’s the most dishonest, because it takes an atrocious actuality, which was a nuclear test that killed hundreds and hundreds of otters, and ducks, in an extremely gruesome way, and it puts a happy face on this, and actually represents it as a benevolent deed.

FILM CLIP: CANNIKIN EXPLOSION: As ground motion from the explosion moved through water in lakes near the test point, it created a momentary sharp rise in pressure, and water was thrown into the air. This photo sequence was cut short because of the effect of strong ground motion on the photo station. Some rocks and sea stacks along the coast were damaged by ground motion. Preliminary indications were that the beach and ocean floor in the near vicinity of the Cannikin site were raised four to six feet permanently. As predicted, some bio-environmental effects of Cannikin were noticeable, but no permanent harm to Amchitka’s wildlife populations, or plant life, is expected.

NARRATOR: The number and variety of experiments depicted in these films reflect an unquenchable curiosity about nuclear explosions and their effects.

WEISGALL: It’s kind of like boys playing with matches up in the attic.

NARRATOR: In his research on the 1946 Crossroads tests, Weisgall came across a terse letter from Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atom bomb,” to President Truman.

WEISGALL: He said “if you drop an atomic bomb on a ship, you will sink it.” Why, he asked, do you need to spend $400 million, take ninety-five ships to Bikini Atoll, and 40,000 men, and spend all that money to see what the effects are going to be? You’ll sink it.

NARRATOR: Another message echoes throughout these films: nuclear weapons are not fundamentally different from any other weapon, and therefore are not cause for alarm.

FILM CLIP: A nuclear weapon represents potentials outside the concepts of conventional weapons, but, this is not an ultimate weapon, nor one calling for unreasoning fear. It is merely another arm, another addition to our national arsenal.

WEISGALL: This film footage underscores the same ignorance and arrogance that characterized the US nuclear testing program from its birth. We were putting out propaganda films, and the propaganda, the story, was largely false. That there’s nothing to worry about, everybody’s going to be safe, this is just another weapon, it’s another arrow in our quiver. Well it was not, and is not another arrow in a quiver; it is a separate, extraordinary weapon, that has profound effects, beyond military applications.

MILLER: The films couldn’t help but show you the very thing they were trying to deny.

NARRATOR: It’s important to bear in mind the Cold War context in which these events took place – a period of fear and secrecy in which nuclear war with the Soviet Union loomed as a very real possibility.

WEISGALL: I can’t begin to tell you the number of veterans I have met over the years, who believed in the bomb, who also never even told their spouses what they were doing. There was a secrecy about all of this, but they were true patriots, they believed they were foot soldiers in this Cold War, and they were doing the right thing.

NARRATOR: While now we may feel we can “see through” these films, in their day, they were not so transparent. In today’s media-saturated world, it’s important to remember the spin, P.R., and message-crafting behind the images we see.

MILLER: It’s easy to laugh these films off, because they’re so dated, it looks so cheesy. But we really shouldn’t do that. Just because techniques are dated, doesn’t mean that we are, in fact, necessarily any more sophisticated, or any savvier now than our parents or grandparents were back then. Let’s take a look at Star Wars, for example. Look at how the Gulf War was televised. Look at how the stealth bomber, and the stealth fighter, have been extolled, using state of the art propaganda techniques, that don’t strike us as cheesy and dated, simply because they are up to date.

NARRATOR: Though the Cold War is over, nuclear weapons are still very much part of our lives. The U.S. has resumed producing tritium fuel for new warheads; President Clinton has stated that “nuclear weapons will remain the cornerstone of U.S. security indefinitely;” and a top Pentagon official recently declared, “this will never change.” It seems our strange love affair with the Bomb is alive and well in the new millennium.